So, I watched it! Haven't posted in the site a whole ton in the past few... months? Years? Maybe one of these days I'll finish the huge stack of MTMTE trade paperbacks and write some toy reviews.

It's been some time, is what I mean.

So, obviously, spoilers for anyone who hasn't watched the movie, if the big caps-lock word on the title hasn't warned you yet. I could use the spoiler tag, but I didn't feel like posting a huge block of white.

So, yeah, spoiler alert.

TL;DR version? It was messier than Age of Extinction. I liked it enough as a dumb popcorn flick and a Michael Bay movie, and being a huge fan of the movieverse in general I enjoyed the hell out of the movie... but by god, there were some really unnecessary shit in there. Age of Extinction was bloated and around 30 minutes too long, but at least it had focus, with two central plotlines -- the KSI stuff and the Lockdown stuff.

This one was a lot messier. While I don't think it ever got quite as bad as ROTF was in some places, the sheer amount of plotlines running in this movie -- Quintessa, Nemesis Prime, the junkyard refugee camp, Megatron doing his own thing, Sir Anthony Hopkins's big conspiracy, the descendant of Merlin... there are so much stuff going on that I really question if some of them couldn't have been cut out.

Isabella, the little girl from the trailers who is friends with Transformer refugees being hunted down by the latest in a series of anti-Transformer government black ops team, the TRF, gets her buddy Canopy killed by the TRF's AT-ST. She hangs out with her adorable buddy Sqweeks, but honestly is completely irrelevant and is only there to ask Cade Yeager about the state of the Autobots right now... both of which end up being completely pointless. The Autobots live in a junkyard and all that, being hunted by the TRF, but that bit gets thrown out of the window in act 2. Isabella and Sqweeks are also relatively pointless, being the true definition of 'tagalong kids'.

Cade himself was... okay? He's still a huge jerkhole despite how the movie portrays him as the hero, but, god, I really want to punch him in the face at some point. His huge out-of-nowhere rant in the underwater ship was kind of out of nowhere and rather dickish.

Sir Anthony Hopkins's character... Sir... um... shit, I forgot his name. Anyway, Sir Anthony Hopkins stole the show, alongside his badass sociopath of a robot butler, Cogman. Obviously, since, y'know, it's Anthony Hopkins. He made a role that would've been crappy and full of exposition work really well, as he goes through the whole talk of how, yet once more, the Transformers and humanity's history have been tied in together in the past, which is admittedly getting absurdly silly. The fact that there's a Witwickian Order going on and apparently the Witwickies are part of it raises even more continuity problems than answers it. So is the revelation that the likes of Bumblebee have been participating in events like WWII, which, again, raises even more questions. But hey, Anthony Hopkins is amazing.

The main lady, Vivienne, is more plot device with a British accent than anything, though we're slowly moving away from the female lead being just eye candy -- I don't think we got any blatant fanservice 'masturbate to this, pre-teen boys' shot. The way she was introduced to the movie felt wonky and odd, though.

A big complaint I have is that none of the returning characters end up doing much. A lot of hullabaloo is made over Josh Duhammel's Lennox and John Torturro's Simmons returning, but Simmons just enters and exits the plot for what accounts as a glorified cameo. And for all Lennox did in the movie as (theoretically) the main face of the human villain organization, other than a brief conversation with Bumblebee in the beginning he also doesn't do much and really even up to the end we didn't get the obligatory "Lennox sees the error of joining this asshole organization" moment. General Morshower shows up too, but, shit, he didn't even do anything. Not that he did much in ROTF and DOTM, mind you, but still.

The robot bits, now.

One of the good things I appreciate and dislike is that the movie this time around focuses around the central cast of Cade, Vivienne, Bumblebee, Anthony Hopkins and Cogman, leaving the rest of the crew waiting until they show up for a big hurrah reinforcement army at the end. So yeah, Hound, Drift and Crosshairs show up in the junkyard with a couple of others (the baby dinosaurs and Wheelie) and have some funny lines, and Hound gets to fight Megatron twice, but they end up just staying out of the action. Which is a boo.

Ut Rud, er, Hot Rod, is more there for jokes than anything. He has a French accent, they make fun of it a little, and he apparently carries around the Chronosphere from the G1 cartoon, allowing him to create fields where time slows down. He doesn't actually do much, but I like him more than I think I should.

Grimlock and Slug are the only ones who make an appearance among the Dinobots, and Grimlock is just there to vomit out a car like the trailers, and later take out an entire squad of TRF vehicles, but afterwards disappear from the plot.

There's also this random... Daytrader dude, who's like a Junkion that holds a bunch of stuff on his back and trades it with Cade's little community. And shows up with Lockdown's ship to bring the Autobots for the final battle. That was weird. You'd think Grimlock at least would show up near the end, especially after AOE put so much talk on them being the knights of something or other.

Topspin survived, gets actual lines in this movie, and is in Cuba playing volleyball with Simmons. Yay! Now where are Sideswipe and Dino?

Also, a bunch of dudes -- Scrapper in the junkyard, the random old tank guarding Anthony Hopkins' castle, and a different old dude -- literally show up for a couple of shots and disappearing.

Now you notice I've barely spoken about Optimus Prime, because he's actually barely in the movie. He lands on the wrecked Cybertron, and meets his maker, Quintessa... who quickly brainwashes him into Nemesis Prime. He fights with Bumblebee a bit, and Evil Peter Cullen, in the words of Crosshairs: "goosebumps everywhere". He then goes back to being heroic Optimus Prime, disappears for half of the climax (it's not tangled in construction wires, but apparently he's just happily riding a dragon in the middle of the apocalypse) before going all sword-fighty kill happy.

There are some cool bits of revelation which is taken from Transformers: Prime, where Earth is revealed to be Unicron, and Quintessa is bringing Cybertron to drain Earth of energy but Unicron himself doesn't appear and it's muddled just what the true mission of the ancient knights are. One of them calls Quintessa the great deceiver, but it's really unclear what the hell's going on with the Quintessa/Cybertron/Unicron bit, or why Megatron changes allegiances to serve Quintessa halfway throughout the movie. I guess it's building up for a sixth movie where we actually fight Unicron, but the introdumps just kind of pile over each other and it ends up being a bit weirdly confusing.

We get a Starscream cameo! He shows up as a head, and Megatron mocks him.

Megatron is awesome, though in the fifth movie in a row he gets second billing. At least he doesn't look like a hobo, though, and I'm sure this is my favourite iteration of Megatron's body ever. It's really weird because the Decepticons are basically reduced to him and Barricade, who also looks cool but don't do much, and for whatever reason the military, despite hunting down Decepticons, decides to cooperate with Megatron so long as they get information about the incoming Cybertron? I'm certainly sad the Decepticons aren't in it more.

Rather strangely, Megatron and Lennox go through a bit of a roll call moment to introduce the new Decepticons, and it is so cringe-inducing to hear that lineup include names like 'Dreadbot', 'Mohawk' and 'Nitro Zeus'. Just... why, filmmakers, why? You have easily a couple hundred Decepticon names to use, and you pick 'Dreadbot'? The only ones with a borderline acceptable name are Onslaught and Berserker, but Berserker doesn't get released. The Decepticons act more like weird gangsters in this one, which is... weird, but not one I completely dislike.

Also not sure why the TRF are keeping at least five Decepticons prisoner when they shot Canopy dead for no real reason. Nearly everyone dies in the big Autobot-Decepticon clash in the abandoned city, easily my favourite part of the movie -- only Megatron, Barricade and Nitro Zeus survives. Nitro Zeus makes it throughout nearly the entire movie before Bumblebee blows his head off in the climax, gets a couple of thuggish lines, which isn't bad for a character that screams 'redshirt'.

Barricade, following the tradition he set in the first movie, gets a couple of brief fight scenes, and then disappears from the plot halfway through the climax. Well, that was pointless.

Megatron, meanwhile, gets an epic fight with Prime, and at one point he gets dogpiled by Bumblebee, Hot Rod and Hound, and thankfully he doesn't die or walk away, but gets kicked out of the collapsing planet all 1986-Galvatron style. That's a more dignified way to go out while still saving him for Movie 6.

The Unicron-esque horned dudes are called Infernocons, and they're combiners that combine into a big bug-faced Unicron clone. Meanwhile, the three-headed dragon (who's never named here) ends up being made up of the twelve knights, whose motivations and why the hell do they give control of their combined form to Merlin, is weird. Honestly, the whole 'staff of Merlin' thing is not something I'm a big fan of.

There's a mid-credits scene where Quintessa apparently didn't implode, but survives as a human and is telling a bunch of researchers about the horns of Unicron that appeared all over the Earth.

Overall, the plot is kind of too messy for my liking -- messier than any non-ROTF Transformers movie, and I'm a little let down by the lack of answers that we get in the movie in response to some of the plot threads that are supposed to be answered here. But the fight scenes are cool, the big set scenes of the underwater ship rising out of the ocean and Cybertron's tendril-tentacle things raking cities off the face of the planet is cool, the continuity cameos (the Ark, the Fallen's pyramid, Sam Witwicky's face, Starscream's head, 'we were brothers') are cool... but they tried to fit in too much with too little payoff. It's not terrible, but it's not good. I'd actually rank this second-to-last if we're ranking the five movies in a row.

Odd- I actually felt like it had less easily-trimmable fat than AOE. The disparate plotlines were all facets of the same main story: Cybertron is coming to kill Earth, because Earth is Unicron. The stuff with the Autobots hiding out is just natural fallout we've been moving towards for a few films in a row.

I enjoyed it. It was big and dumb and over-the-top, but it looked incredible and the jokes made me chuckle and the message about helping refugees and immigrants even when the authorities call that a crime was a valuable one.

Honestly, though? My ideal Transformers film now would go smaller, not bigger. I know that won't happen with the way this one teased extra Unicron action, but for my money the best action in this series has been a small number of robots having cool fights for understandable stakes. Prime fighting three Decepticons to protect Sam? Fantastic. Prime and an army of Autobots, human soldiers, knights and all this fighting the Decepticons, and the Transformer devil and her army, on an exploding planet in the sky, to save all life on Earth? Bit much.

Overall though, I enjoyed it and I'm up for more. I don't even mind a lot of the transformers being forgettable. How many hi-and-bye cameos were in the classic cartoons and comicbooks?

Still alive, I'm just bad at keeping up with forums.
You can read my articles and reviews at gintendo.co.uk but I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Isabella and Sqweeks are honestly the big glaring easily-trimmable material. You can cut the entire thing out and just start off the present-day stuff with Cade dealing with the TRF and the Autobot refugees.

I'd also cut out the WWII flashback, which felt really necessary to turn into a full scene. Ditto for the Merlin prologue, which ran on for a fair bit longer than it needed to be.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Summerhayes

but it looked incredible

Indeed -- the big money shots were the Cybertron tendrils raking cities off the face of the Earth, and that one scene when the big submerged ship rose up from the ocean. But there were so many great smaller shots too -- the random little dudes combining into a big-ass three headed dragon and a little Unicron made me squee so much.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Summerhayes

the jokes made me chuckle

Cogman and Anthony Hopkins are a lot, lot funnier than the human cast in Age of Extinction, that's for sure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Summerhayes

and the message about helping refugees and immigrants even when the authorities call that a crime was a valuable one.

Agreed! I felt like the strongest action scenes that kept me on my seat was the standoff between Megatron's crew and the Autobot refugees... Part of what made AoE so enjoyable for me personally (the problems of smushing two movies into one aside) is that the plotline is relatively small and self contained, to "Lockdown hunts down Optimus Prime, humans gets caught in the middle."

Quote:

Originally Posted by Summerhayes

How many hi-and-bye cameos were in the classic cartoons and comicbooks?

I'd agree on Izabella and Squeaks, though at the same time they weren't in it that much. They never had a scene that went on forever like the tightrope or the magnet in AOE. The Nazi bit was really dumb, as putting any of the 2007 Autobots on Earth before that film makes no sense and adds nothing to the film.
I really liked the Merlin bit though so I'm gonna disagree with you on that one.

Still alive, I'm just bad at keeping up with forums.
You can read my articles and reviews at gintendo.co.uk but I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Just saw it. I mean... yeah. I don't think the movie justified its four and half hour runtime. Act one, or the first couple of hours, could have been trimmed way the hell down. The little girl did fine, but absolutely every bit she was in should have been cut at the scripting level. The junkyard stuff showed what cade has been up to since the last movie I guess, but I was bored more than anything through this part and the following "mini-TIE bombers follow the people through the abandoned city" bit. And the whole "megatron bargains with the military to get some troops" bit seemed forced and pointless. I mean, if robots are falling out the sky, why have more scenes to have more robots come from somewhere else? Especially if they're going to have terrible, terrible names? Just have Megatron and co show up and get going.

Act two, or the middle hour that starts with anthony hopkins, was actually pretty enjoyable. Anthony Hopkins was ****ing awesome in this. Cogman too. The whole "secret history" and Merlin's descendant part was ridiculous, but at least it was straightforwardly ridiculous. "Got to get a thing and the lady is the only one that can do the thing, got it," I remember thinking.

Act three, or the last hour and a half, was okay I guess. Biggest problem was the lack of establishing shots and cybertron being covered in moss the exact shade of green of stone henge. I absolutely could not keep track of whether they were on the ground, on a chunk of ground levitated up, on a helicopter inside the knight ship, on a helicopter on a chunk of cybertron, on a where the **** are the characters? Is the ignition chamber on a chunk of cybertron up in the air or is it in stone henge? If it's in stone henge then why is it so far up in the air? Shouldn't the ignition chamber be in the big ship that was underwater that looked like a key? Wouldn't that make it the key to awakening unicron instead of restoring cybertron? Then why are the two ignition ports drifting so close together? I mean, are there two ignition sites? If not, then what's the point of the big key ship thing, that was on earth, going to stone henge, which has something nebulously to do with unicron, if the bad guy plot is to get it to a chunk of cybertron where quintessa is?

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

The worst thing I can say about this movie is that it was, more than anything else, boring. I also noticed a distinct lack of epic quotes by Prime. Bumblebee finally talking again was fine, but "sting like a bee?" They took three years to come up with that?

With the other movies, as dumb as they can be, I always left the theater feeling excited. With this one, I left feeling drained.

No reason Bumblebee can't have been knocking about on Earth since the 40s as far as I'm concerned.

It's not impossible, of course. It's just kinda weird because everyone seems to be acting in the 2007 movie that this is the first contact they have. They could just have spotty memory or just be pretending for the sake of Sam, though, and it's not that it causes and sort of huge glaring error.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clay

Just saw it. I mean... yeah. I don't think the movie justified its four and half hour runtime.

The runtime was the biggest problem, I agree. And like you, I definitely agreed that the first act could've been trimmed the hell down. The Mini-TIE stuff took forever and while I get that they wanted some human action scenes, and it's better than Cade's weak attempts of joking around, I'd rather they quickly moved to the Anthony hopkins stuff.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clay

And the whole "megatron bargains with the military to get some troops" bit seemed forced and pointless. I mean, if robots are falling out the sky, why have more scenes to have more robots come from somewhere else? Especially if they're going to have terrible, terrible names? Just have Megatron and co show up and get going.

This. Especially after a couple scenes ago they just established that the TRF are hunting down and shooting random Autobots (or, well, whatever Canopy is) for being barely-threatening, but they're keeping Decepticons that are actively causing harm and mayhem prisoner? That's just weird.

Also forgot that there was an actual montage that shows protoform meteors falling all over the planet, which makes it even more weirdly glaring. It's not like Megatron making a deal with the TRF was such a huge part of the plot either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clay

Act two, or the middle hour that starts with anthony hopkins, was actually pretty enjoyable.

Oh, yeah, the man chewed up scenery like no one's business. Cogman's also insane and wacky, but they're the right kind of wacky to be entertaining.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clay

The worst thing I can say about this movie is that it was, more than anything else, boring. I also noticed a distinct lack of epic quotes by Prime. Bumblebee finally talking again was fine, but "sting like a bee?" They took three years to come up with that?

There was that speech before the Autobots went into their big 'everyone charge the ignition chamber' rush, but that felt like a weaker version of the Dark of the Moon WE WILL KILL THEM ALL speech.

It's not impossible, of course. It's just kinda weird because everyone seems to be acting in the 2007 movie that this is the first contact they have. They could just have spotty memory or just be pretending for the sake of Sam, though, and it's not that it causes and sort of huge glaring error.

Eh, in the first movie it was all "we're only here because of the cube", then in the second one we discovered they were here in Egyptian times and the Matrix was buried here; in the third one the Moon Landing was specifically to investigate the Ark crashing on the moon; in the fourth one we discovered that the dinosaurs were wiped out to create metal to make Transformers... and now we've got "Merlin was mates with some Transformers and Earth is actually Unicron".

Gonna be honest, from where I'm stood, "Bumblebee was here 60 years before hooking up with Sam and summoning Optimus" is the least contrived historical retcon we've been fed.

I only had a concern because, like Blackjack says, the character's themselves acted like they'd only just discovered Earth. I suppose, in Transformers time, Bee being here for 60 years is "only just arrived". He could have been hanging about waiting for a sign of where the cube is -which he got when Sam put the glasses online - before calling Optimus and co. To Optimus, Earth was an unknown planet when Bee called him but then they discovered all the closer ties. I GUESS.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blackjack

Not enough Prime in this movie, I think.

Definitely. We didn't get long enough for Nemesis Prime to be a threat. The "bad Optimus" thing was all over the trailers, and with him and Megatron both having Quintessa's brainwashing facepaint, I was looking forward to them working together. But actually, we got one fight scene then he went back to being a good guy. I was hoping for the Transformers equivalent of F8 of the Furious.

Then we also got a whole film teasing heroic Optimus before he ended up not doing all that much anyway.

Still alive, I'm just bad at keeping up with forums.
You can read my articles and reviews at gintendo.co.uk but I wouldn't bother if I were you.

I enjoyed this! Perversely, I enjoyed how busy it was with all the meandering and random plots. Even with half of them not going anywhere. It kept my interest and stopped me having the feeling I had during DOTM and AOE - 'when will it end?'. It just felt a bit more pacy to me than the last two.

I really liked Izabella and it was a shame she was reduced to kid sidekick by the end, as she was ace and I enjoyed her acting Mark Wahlberg off the screen, but by the time Cade gets her back to the junkyard there's not a lot for her to do - although fixing Sqweeks with all the tech lying about might have been nice.

Totally agree on the awful names given to the Decepticons and the whole TFR thing was a nonsense. They were like a less effective Cemetery Wind.

Liked Quintessa and all the macguffin stuff and the Knights, with their mysterious mission. I wonder if they stole the staff with the intention of keeping it away from Quintessa, but f**k their luck if they didn't end up crashing the one place they really shouldn't. Her plan to drain Unicron to restore Cyberton made sense to me and reminded me of the sun harvester thingy from ROTF (presumably any suitable energy source would have the same effect at restoring Cybertron).

Anthony Hopkins was clearly having a ball and I really enjoyed his character and Cogman (voiced by that dude I can never remember the name of, but was the butler in Downton recently); as well as Hot Rod. Although his bug eyed face was a bit horrible to look at.

Optimus Prime. Sigh. He really felt like a caricature here, and I kept laughing every time he bellowed "I am Optimus Prime" (which he did a lot). After all the character development he got in AOE, this felt like a massive step back. And the Nemesis thing was just guff. They didn't even make him BLACK. And far too easily defeated by the power of friendship. Or something. And that whole fight scene with 'bee felt really undermined after we'd seen 'bee now has the ability to put himself back together...

Enjoyed the rest of the human cast for what they were (did like all the scenes with Vivienne's family, and the ever great Rebecca Front getting some nice funny lines) I don't really like Hound, Crosshairs and Drift who all come across as... dicks. In fact throughout all the live action films, a lot of the Autobots come across as arseholes and I can never get with them. I can't root for a bunch of prattling idiots who seem more interested in fighting amongst themselves. I did like seeing Topspin chilling out in Cuba and just wanting to go play ball on the beach (!). Why couldn't we have more of him instead?

Yeah, the Autobots weren't very heroic, were they? Crosshairs is just a cock. Drift is supposed to be all zen and disciplined, but then he has his sword to someone's throat a second later. I've hated Hound ever since he shot that caged creature in AOE. Optimus Prime, now saint of killers. These are the good guys? WTF? No wonder Bumblebee gets his own spin-off. He was the only decent bot.

That Topspin in Cuba had Leadfoot's head? Onslaught and Canopy were Long Haul clones, Nitro Zeus (gag, this ain't Pacific Rim) was a grey Shockwave, lazy.

How the hell does Bumblebee get completely dismembered, and just fly back together? That would have helped in the first movie. Why does Megatron have a new body every movie? Wasn't Cybertron destroyed at the end of DOTM? It sure looked like it, as it was being sucked into that vortex.

That, and more, is why I didn't enjoy this one. What a wreck! I went in with low expectations, and they still disappointed me. Sure, there were some cool sights to see, and Cogman playing the organ was amusing. But it's just not enough.

I was sat there wondering how the entire US navy makes its way to the UK in just one afternoon, and how Anthony Hopkins goes from London to Oxford to Dover and back to London again all via Bank junction and in the space of about ten minutes.

Then I realised how utterly ludicrous everything else in the movie was and decided to give up.

My main bugbear was the final battle and where the Autobots were. Prime gives a big speech about "doing the thing" then inexplicably blasts off somewhere to go off with his giant three-headed dragon and wait until he could re-appear at the final crucial moment. It strikes me that both Prime and King Arthur's robot knights would have been pretty useful during the whole "crash-landed helicopter" part. But no, just leave it to the humans. Did I miss the part where he said that they all had to go off and do something? Or were they just getting a Frappucino?

As Blackjack mentioned though, there was a lot of this. Barricade is hanging out to start with and then seemingly has to urgently go off to file his tax return or something.

Big flaw is that it is two films badly stapled together, even more blatantly than the last one. Half the characters vanish for an hour! Just starting the film with Cade and team being brought to England and incorporating meeting an orphan (which is really the only actually semi-relevant thing to happen in his plot at the start) and it'd work much better.

The actual film was just such huge messy fun though. Especially Tony Hopkins who really threw himself into with gay abandon and was utterly shameless but lovely.

Didn't mind Prime being mostly absent, each of his showings felt like they had weight to them. The evil eyes were a late addition though weren't they? Without they Prime would seem to be doing all this by his own choice.

Megatron vanishing for an hour on the other hand felt weak. If only because they idea of humanity having to work with him to stop a threat in Prime's absence is a much better one than anything else in the film but only lasts for once (easily cut, it's trying to pretend the new Decepticons are actual characters, but for what they contribute the "And lots of Transformers have come to Earth" line covers it) scene. Megs must have some serious blackmail photos of Bay to keep being put in these films so reluctantly.

On the other hand I thought it was hilarious Megs knows all about who created them and (seems to) work for them when Prime didn't have a clue in the last film.

And it's nice he got over the whole Galvatron thing.

Oh, and did I miss something with Cade and Lennox? They don't seem to exchange names during their first meeting, but second time Cade is all "YOU'RE MAKING A BIG MISTAKE LENNOX!" with a passion that suggests he has a clue who he is.

Mind, feels like a lot was cut from the Lennox plot, Morshower mentions he's undercover with the Bastard Soldier Brigade but that then never comes up again. Plus Skinner from the X-Files is loitering in a couple of brief shots, making it look like something with him was cut.

The new mythology stuff was clearly designed to work first and foremost for folk that watch a Transformers film every couple of years and don't have exact recall of every detail. Which is fair enough (it's the sort of thing that's always worked for The X-Men movies), but I didn't feel especially invested in Unicron or Quintessa as big new ideas.

The lower domestic box office has of course been mama from heaven for the "Not only do I not like these films, but in fact no one really likes these films!" folk of course. I do think the ones who are expecting the Bay style to be abandoned are fooling themselves though (I saw someone who wanted a more family friendly film suggest Flint Dille should be put in charge! That's the guy whose TF film was not only a disaster but had small children crying in cinemas). They're more likely to pay Shia and Megan a lot to come back for the 6th and taking things back to Baysics.

On a semi-related bit of whorish self-promotion, I've just guested on a podcast talking about that casual fan/"real" fan tension, in which the Bay films do come up:

However, I don't find myself disliking the Michael Bay TF films because I think it slaughters my childhood or because Bumblo isn't a Beetle.

I mainly just struggle because they are rubbish. Basic coherent storytelling would work for me. I'd like to one day see a TF movie where I don't come out of the cinema with my wife asking me "So did all of that just not make any sense to me because I don't know Transformers?"

Because with the Bay movies I can only answer "no, it made no sense to anyone, it was just batshit crazy."

Still, I've got used to it now, the early films I went in with expectation, now I go in thinking: "Set brain to standby".

I saw it, and I liked it. Yes, the plot's a bit of a mess, but this one also seems like they decided halfway through that they wanted to do an expanded cinematic universe, hence the whole Unicron bit, and from all of the Bay movies I've seen, when he makes a movie it's beginning-middle-end. Admittedly, prior to Transformers, all I'd seen of his work was The Rock(which I really like), Crimson Tide(I think that's one of his), and Pearl Harbor(well, 2 out of three ain't bad, I guess). I don't think he'd actually done anything with a sequel(as far as I know) before he did ROTF.

One thing I really liked was the humor. Hot Rod being stuck with his accent in a similar way to Bumblebee being stuck with talking in sound bites(although watching the Lego Batman Movie after watching Bumblebee's reaction to his new voice is kind of weird), and the fact that Cogsman is so utterly distracting when Hopkins is explaining stuff was actually pretty funny.

I wound up missing the first few minutes of the movie, though. Is there an explanation as to why Megs is back to being Megs and not Galvy?

As a professional tanuki (I'm a Japanese mythological animal, and a good luck charm), I have an alarm clock built into me somewhere. I also look like a stuffed animal. And you thought your life was tough......

Ah. So one for two instead. Probably means I should watch Bad Boys at some point....

But I was thinking more in terms of he makes the movie(I have no clue how closely he works with the writers on the script), and he's not thinking "gotta set up for a sequel" as much as "hot chick, stuff goes boom, military does stuff, more stuff goes boom, movie ends". If talk of a sequel comes up, more stuff goes boom, and the writers can sort out how everything ties together. This time, Last Knight is setting up not only TF 6: HOLY CRAP!(working title), but at the very least the Bumblebee standalone movie(I'm actually hoping for a 'Bee and Roddy buddy pic) and any other standalones they want to try.

As a professional tanuki (I'm a Japanese mythological animal, and a good luck charm), I have an alarm clock built into me somewhere. I also look like a stuffed animal. And you thought your life was tough......

It was pretty lousy, though, wasn't it? Like all the worst bits from the first four just thrown up there. Even I wasn't that crazy about it TBH. Marky Mark was still Marky Mark enough to Marky Mark, the DJD spoof was genuinely hilarious and it was nice to see that Roadbuster and Topspin just ****ed off and left Leadfoot to die but wow, a mess. Though I did like the way they didn't actually junk the doomy possibilities left at the end of AoE; it's almost like that was done on purpose.

I absolutely absolutely hate that kind of secret history bullshit, the whole "Oh yah you know how you never saw Bumblebee come to Earth even though it was heavily implied by basically everything he did that he had well surprise he was in World War 2 and there are all these other Transformers kicking around and they just did **** all while Megatron was scouring the Earth in the second one". Hate it.

Whole Optimus plotline was screwed. He's talked over to Unicron in five seconds and talked back out in five more. After a good set of well-written Autobots in 4 it's back to everyone bar Bumblebee and Optimus ****ing off with the added twist of Optimus also ****ing off. And the numerous Autobots who seemingly just sit this one out was... weird. Not sure about it; bit of a shame we didn't have a genuine face arguing their case. It felt like any minute now the Cuba thing was going to kick into the main plot.

Cogman was shit, boring battle butler cliche, like Willikins in that shit Terry Pratchett book. Anthony Hopkins wasn't the funny sort of bad either, more the kind of "when is this overrated **** going to just **** off and retire and let someone else do this rubbish", i.e. the same thing he's done since about 1995 - Look At Me I'm Anthony ****ing Sir Hopkins And I'm Turning Up In This Prole Film For The Proles With My Superior ****ing Attitude.

Hilariously bad attempt to disguise the actress playing Tessa pegging it. Just say she's in hiding somewhere and be done with it, don't come up with some idiocy about how she's sitting down for her exams a few states over from a ****ing robot war without anyone going "hey, you know the guy we're after who'll do anything for his daughter? Why don't we, like, make some use of that?".